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Race for new Cleric
WhiteCross
Member Posts: 120
I'm trying D&D Online and wanted to run a Cleric.
I dont know enough about the game and am wondering if there is a "best" race for a Cleric.
Any help would be appriciated.
Thanks!
Comments
Are you free to play or paying? Choices might change depending on race but I like Dwarf and Humans as my clerics normally.
Are you planning to heal and cast offensive spells or heal and fight more?
wanted to be more of a Battle Cleric. Melee fight with self heals.
...is that do able?
or is a Pally better?
I think I like the idea of a melee Cleric though. I liked the Warrior Priest in WAR.
Splash two levels of fighter (or paladin, monk, barb for that matter) and the rest in cleric. For a melee build I would take human (for skillz and feats), dwarf (con), or half-orc(str). Make sure to set your self up with the Radiant servent II enhancements. Going melee I would sacrifce cha (screw tuning dead but take extra turnig for your radiant bursts) and just focus on Wis, Con, and Str. Nothing wrong with a cleric melee build, just a bit harder to play because you will be expected to heal first (i love melee healers but you have to be on top of your game, make sure you take quicken spell sooner than later). Good luck, should be fun
thanks for the reply.
I'm not too sure about the mechanics yet, but do I create a level 1 Cleric and build out from there, or a level 1 Fighter and build out from there to Cleric?
sorry, im a noob
I usually take cleric just so I can heal from the beginning and then take fighter after. Having radiant servant makes a huge difference and is a great way to add to your heals. I am not a huge fan or player of the melee clerics myself so I tend not to dump charisma as I like as many turns as I can get for powering radian servant and other turn based skills(except turn itself as its pretty useless) there are some skills that use turns that as a melee cleric you will find very useful in added healing powers.
Also in your skills there is one called heal. It has no use as a cleric. Do not waste skill points in it.
I thought the favored soul was a pretty decent fighting cleric class. Cost about 895 points in store but they always have sales.
They are but they lack some things that clerics have that can make them good at both. Different play styles for both are needed though.
Cleric with Radiant Servant can do quite a bit of healing without using a single spell point. FVS really do not have much advantage in melee unless built for it and in most cases that means less or even no offensive casting. With a cleric you can really build to do some melee(not as good as a fighter of course) offensive cast and heal.
Heal is not a complete waste. It gives you regen (health recovery) at rest shrines. How often are people hurt at shrines. Having some skill points in healaing makes you use less spell points healing when your present and others are resting, or your resting yourself. Also once you have Radiant Servant II, you can still use the healing skill points and save a turn use. I wouldn't spend an inordinate amount of skill points into healing, but you should have some skill at it. Same with swim, Jump, spot, and search. Minimum is one point in each of these skills, so if you want you can use an item buff and it won't go to naught. I believe you cannot use item buffs if you don't have at least 1 point in the skill. Repair skill is used for Warforged.
Another point of having healing skill is if you are completely out of spells and radiant bursts/positive energy/no turns and need to bring someone back from dying because they are about to, with a healing kit you can try to bind their wounds. I believe the DC is 20, so you add your skill plus a D20 to try to beat 20, more skill makes it easier to stop them from bleeding to death. Usually you'll have the mana to heal them, but won't you feel foolish if you come into this situation and don't have the healing skill trained up at least some and they bleed to death.
All clerics are forced to have healing. If you want to play a Tank/self healer you could be a warforged/wiz or sorc, or a Favored Soul/non-warforged. Favored Souls usually don't have as much healing as a cleric, they aren't forced to take healing spells.
As a cleric, People you group with are going to expect you to cast heal spells on them if they get hurt in battle. Telling them your not really a healer is a good way to probably get kicked from a few groups. There is a shortage of clerics, and playing a self-healing-only cleric is going to not win you alot of friends. I remember grouping with a FV who told me he wasn't a healer, yet he kept healing me. As far as I was concerned, he was a healer and doing his job. As a cleric one of the downfalls is you have to watch other people's health alot, if you don't, people can die on you quickly in combat. As a cleric, your first job is healing, secondary job is DPS.
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The game is dead not, this game is good we make it and Romania Tv give it 5 goat heads, this is good rating for game.
I never said a clerics job is not to heal, but anyone who says to waste skill points in the heal skill is not planning a cleric properly. The small amount it matters at shrines is in no way making up for what you could actually put those skill points into.
Favored souls are not forced to take healing spells but other than Radiant Servant can have just as much healing as a cleric.
As a cleric healing is not your first job. Helping to mitigate incoming damage can be a much better use of spell points, but that is the more advanced gameplay version.
Keeping the party alive is your first job as a cleric. Whether you do it with crowd control, buffing up the party, healing, or a combination of the 3.. DPS is secondary. command, greater command, sound blast, and a few other spells help to keep mobs down off their feet or stunned so they cannot do damage you have to heal. Bless, Prayer, Aid Mass, Shield of faith mass, bears end mass, protection from all energy mass, and several other spells will keep the party more resilent in the fight.
Usually you will have to do some healing as a cleric. clerics are forced to take healing spells. They don't have a choice. FV's don't get healing spells they have to take . They can choose what they want and don't want. FV's also don't get as many spells as a cleric.
Of the 3 roles of crowd control, buffing the party, and healing, the most important is healing. You can not bother to buff or crowd control, but if you don't heal the party then the party is that much more fragile. With regard to damage mitigation, Resist Energy > protection from energy. Resist energy never goes away until its duration is up, protection from energy goes away once it stops the appropriate amount of damage or the duration expires. Resist energy is a more reliable form of defense. The problem with resist energy is that you don't get an resist all energy spell, so have to choose each of the 5 different types individually. Casting this spell on everyone for all 5 elements would be time consuming and mana intensive.
CLERICS ARE HEALERS FIRST AND FOREMOST. Probably the worst *RACE for a cleric is war-forged.
*Edited to be written as intended.
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The game is dead not, this game is good we make it and Romania Tv give it 5 goat heads, this is good rating for game.
Warforged is the worst choice and it should be obvious. Arcane repair spells heal them best. If your warforged cleric, you'll always waste alot of mana self-healing. The immunities of a war-forged don't make up for the healing aspect.
Buffing the party is not a waste of mana, if done conservatively. Bless lasts quite awhile and gives everyone 5% more chance to hit. That might not seem like alot, but if your hitting 75% of the time time, now your hitting 80% of the time, you just went from missing 1 in 4 to missing 1 in 5. It also combines with Prayer, although prayer's duration isn't as long as bless. Resist energy spells are for when people die and lose ship buffs or your too lazy to get ship buffs.
Not every cleric is high enough lvl to even have radiant servant. The more intense fighting in DDO on ELITE usually requires healing. Its easy to stop watching health for a bit and then people start dying because you weren't ready to heal them. At the higher levels probably one of the best spells is HEAL. Its a 6th level spell but for healing purposes is one of the most useful, healing quite alot.
Once you get Radiant Servant 2, its best to empower (and maximize) your abilities . Empower is forced on you to even be a radiant servant, and it costs you nothing to put these feats on the power. It makes the power that much more effective. The new release 11 allows you now to add spell modifying feats onto each individual spell/power. So by adding empower, my positive energy pulses is healing from 7's to 20's, major ujpgrade. I still need to get the maximize feat, looking forward to it being even better.
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The game is dead not, this game is good we make it and Romania Tv give it 5 goat heads, this is good rating for game.
Its not always a good idea to have the party on top of you in the higher levels. Relying only on the healing abilities of Radiant servant makes you more suseptable to flame strike, fireball, and other AOE's that will hit everyone because they are all near the cleric getting that healing. Its usually best to spread out so only a few people are getting hit.
Almost all groups want a healer in them to be more effective and resilent. A more fragile group that shouldn't be doing anything too difficult is one without a healer.
I remember running my FV in a mission healing people and had a TR who didn't need much healing. He went off on his own and ended up dying to some boss, probably got immobolized. I mentioned before he went off on his own that he was the one person I wasn't worried about. Appearantly the TR wasn't invincible. He Rage-quit the party and we finished the quest without him.
If your not running missions on ELITE and getting max experience/favor out of it, then yea, you might be able to squeak by without a healer. Most normal missions don't require you to have a trapper either.
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The game is dead not, this game is good we make it and Romania Tv give it 5 goat heads, this is good rating for game.
Having run all of DDO over the years and playing both FVS and Clerics to level 20 I can tell you that you are wasting spell points with many of your buffs.
I did not say every healer can rely solely on the Radiant Servant abilities. I was clearly speaking about well played groups and not the random PUGs many play with.
DDO is no longer a very hard game and a well played group can get by with a Bard as a main healer in amny places even on ELITE.
A guild mate was telling me he was in a group with an elf with a 6 con, obviously a pick-up group (PUG). This elf had 39 HP. He was obviously a gimp player and I don't think 2 clerics bursting radiant servant constantly could keep that guy vertical. 50 hit point blast and that guy is toast.
Some missions just aren't hard. My 9th level sorcerer elf with 97 hit points with a con of 10 just ran thru catacombs on elite and had no problems. He has a buff he uses alot, false life, to keep his hit points buffered so mobs hitting him a little don't actually hurt him much. He's also several levels above the mission he is doing, and fire wall is very powerful at this level. He didn't even bother to use a pocket healer.
Some missions you can use a bard and they work well. Even on elite. Especially when your 4 levels higher than the elite mission, even after the +2 modifier.
All of my characters ran thru kundarak favor for more bank space, and one of the missions we ran constantly was Taming the Flames on Elite. This is a pain in the butt mission. We had 2 clerics in one of the many missions I ran. At end of mission when we completed it, cleric was telling me how important it was to have 2 clerics in that mission. Most of my groups where 7 or 8th level, this group had 10th levels in it with two clerics. The mission on elite is super hard, people still died even with two clerics. One of the clerics could rezz. The other one was 9th, but had 8 levels in cleric and one in fighter.
Some missions put out serious damage. Even with good resists.
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The game is dead not, this game is good we make it and Romania Tv give it 5 goat heads, this is good rating for game.
Okay, so now you got a cleric who cannot self-heal. I stick with the fact that war-forged are the worst class for a cleric. The best classes for a war-forged are sorc or wizard, since they have repair spells that can make them self-healing. Clerics like Paladins also need good charisma to turn effectively. War-forged have minuses to charisma, on top of the healing problem.
If you still don't think War-forged are the worst class for clerics, what is the worst class, and why?
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The game is dead not, this game is good we make it and Romania Tv give it 5 goat heads, this is good rating for game.
Turn is useless. If you build a cleric to turn undead you are wasting your turn undeads when they have much better uses.
I would say elves and halflings are worse. Elves because the negative to con which is one of a clerics most needed stats and Halfling because they get a size penalty to carrying capacity which can cause many problems.
Warforged might seem like the worst to newish players or the inexperienced with the game, but the fact is that Warforged are fine after the first few levels.